Wednesday, May 14, 2008

More on Science and Religion

I posted yesterday on science and religion, and here are a couple more articles. These articles are from New Scientist, and each takes a different angle on religion and its relationship to and with science.

First up: Perspectives: Why humanity needs a God of creativity, by Stuart Kauffman

WITH economic and communications globalisation, some form of a global civilisation is beginning to emerge, perhaps homogeneous, perhaps forever diverse. We all face the challenges of global warming. We face peak oil, that year after which we shall never recover so much oil again - with unknown economic consequences, including hunger and resource wars. And all the while, our diverse cultures are being crushed together.

One response is a retreat into fundamentalisms, often religious, often hostile. This is hardly surprising, as humanity is still split between 3 billion who believe in the Abrahamic God (the majority of whom are Muslim, though a powerful minority are fundamentalist Christians), a billion who, like myself, believe in no supernatural god (though some of these are militant atheists), and the other traditions such as Buddhism. Clearly there is an urgent need for some new thinking.

That is why I wrote Reinventing the Sacred, though I am well aware that the very possibility and wisdom of such an enterprise is suspect. For those of faith, it is sacrilegious; those who are not religious remember Galileo recanting before the Inquisition and the millions killed in the name of God, and want no part of a God or a sacred that demands retreat from the truth of the world.

The process of reinventing the sacred requires a fresh understanding of science that takes into account complexity theory and the ideas of emergence. It will require a shift from reductionism, the way of thinking that still dominates our scientific world view. Perhaps the purest and simplest version of reductionism was voiced in the early 19th century by the mathematician Simon Pierre Laplace. He envisioned a "demon" - an intelligence which, if supplied with all the current positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, could, using Newton's laws, compute the entire future and past of the universe.

This world view has two features. One is determinism, abandoned in part when quantum mechanics began to emerge a century or so later. It is also the "nothing but" view of the universe which, for example, sees a man found guilty of murder as nothing but particles in motion. As the physicist Steven Weinberg put it, the explanatory arrows all point downwards from societies to people to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry and ultimately to physics.

Now we appear to be at the frontier of a new scientific world view. Many physicists, from Philip Anderson back in the 1970s to, more recently, Robert Laughlin, are coming to doubt the adequacy of reductionism. I am with them: I do not believe that the evolution of biosphere, economy and human culture are derivable from or reducible to physics. Physicists cannot deduce, simulate or confirm the detailed evolution of the biosphere that gave rise to the organised structure and processes that constitute, for example, your heart. Entities such as hearts, that have causal consequences, are "real" in their own right.

The second transition in our view of science is based on Darwinian pre-adaptations. Were we to ask Darwin what the function of the heart is, he would say, to pump blood; but the heart also makes heart sounds and these are not the function of the heart, which was selected, and hence exists, because pumping blood was of selective value. Darwin's idea of a pre-adaptation refers to a property of an organism - heart sounds, say - that is of no selective value in the present environment, but might become of selective value in some different environment and therefore be selected. An example is human middle-ear bones, which are derived from three adjacent jawbones of an early fish. Did a new function come to exist in the biosphere as part of human hearing? Yes. Did that development have consequences for the evolution of the biosphere? Yes.

Read the rest of this post. Kauffman is arguing in favor of a resacralizing of the world, a project I endorse. After all, in the Buddhist view, all things contain Buddha-nature, which makes all things sacred.

Andy Coghlan takes a different view in Religion a figment of human imagination, in a report on the work of Maurice Bloch.

Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.

That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.

Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow live on after they've died.

Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead."

Modern-day religions still embrace this idea of communities bound with the living and the dead, such as the Christian notion of followers being "one body with Christ", or the Islamic "Ummah" uniting Muslims.

Read the rest of this article.

Interesting idea -- the transcendental social. But how do we know other animals do not do this. For example, elephants mourn their dead and return to mark the anniversary of a death in the memory (a group of elephants is, fittingly, a memory). This would require some ability to conceptualize time and individual identity, something usually ascribed only to humans.

Anyway, here is a little more of the article:
Bloch argues that religion is only one manifestation of this unique ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.

"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society."

"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he says.

Chris Frith of University College London, a co-organiser of a "Sapient Mind" meeting in Cambridge last September, thinks Bloch is right, but that "theory of mind" – the ability to recognise that other people or creatures exist, and think for themselves – might be as important as evolution of imagination.

It has always been assumed that humans are the only species with or capable of religion, but as I suggested above, that may not be true. Crows also recognize that other creatures exist and think for themselves -- and have a very good memory for those who have harmed them in some way.

Do crows and elephants (and other animals as well) have a God of some form? Does being able to conceive of an other that thinks and has an identity the only criteria for developing a religion? If so, then no doubt animals are capable of having a God.

I like the idea of a transcendent social, but I don't agree that it necessarily imagines a non-existent God. Rather, it might intuit a spiritual reality within or beyond the material world and create a "God" as a metaphor for that perceived truth.

In this sense, these two articles can both be true -- we need a more sacred understanding of the world, perhaps one that Kauffman suggests at the end of the first article:

Shall we use the "God" word? We do not have to, yet it is still our most powerful invented symbol. Our sense of God has evolved from Yahweh in the desert some 4500 years ago, a jealous, law-giving warrior God, to the God of love that Jesus taught. How many versions have people worshipped in the past 100,000 years?

Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of "God". From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share.
Sounds good to me.


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